[AI in mental healthcare: hope or hype?]

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds promise for addressing significant challenges in mental healthcare, such as workforce shortages, waiting lists, and the need for personalized diagnostics and treatments. However, current high expectations contrast with the complexities revealed by research on clinical implementations. This paper critically examines two clinical applications of AI in mental healthcare: clinical decision support and mental health chatbots. AI-driven decision support tools, despite their capacity to predict treatment outcomes, face ethical and practical challenges, including fairness concerns, limited outcome measurability, and patient perspectives often overlooked during development. Similarly, mental health chatbots, while enhancing accessibility and supporting therapeutic processes, raise concerns regarding patient autonomy, accountability, and safety. Increasing cases of AI chatbot misuseleading toharmful consequences highlight the need for robust ethical guidelines and rigorous validation before clinical implementation. AI's integration in psychiatry thus requires careful consideration of ethical implications, patient-centered design, and recognition of AI's limitations to ensure improvements genuinely enhance patient care.